Managing Mail: Apple Mail vs. Thunderbird

Like many people, I have a growing concern about the privacy of my personal data contained in online webmail services.

Managing my mail locally on my Mac was a huge project for me, involving integrating tens of thousands of emails back to 2001. Mail was from gmail, yahoo, and many years of Outlook PST files.

As I retrieved Gmail's messages back to 2004 using Apple Mail and archived them in Mail, I noticed problems with duplicates. After lots of research I found that there isn't a good method to deal with the duplicate problem in Lion Apple Mail. Apple Mail hides duplicate messages in the background. You can't see them easily, and there is no tool or add-on allowing users to search and destroy them (see discussion). Frustrating if you are managing massive mailbox archives.

I did find a very satisfactory solution to eliminating the duplicates: stop using Apple Mail and switch to Thunderbird.

I had never used Thunderbird before, there's still lots that I like better in the Apple Mail interface. But Thunderbird is light-years more flexible in managing email than is Apple Mail, largely because Thunderbird is an open platform with excellent Add-ons available. Not so for Lion Apple Mail, which is for all intents and purposes a closed platform.

Thunderbird has an add-on: http://bit.ly/tbirdimportexport available to quickly import your Apple Mail to Thunderbird.

Once that is done, the nifty Remove Duplicate Messages Add On provides a very flexible, quick way to get rid of duplicates - see http://bit.ly/tbird-dups. You can adjust the rules as you wish, for example identifying messages that have the same "From" and which have the same line count.

Now that the project is complete, I'm very happy with Thunderbird to manage my email archives. Though I actually would prefer the Lion Apple Mail interface for day to day use, it just isn't flexible enough.

Ah, the things we do for privacy these days!